Casinos have treated important players with free or reduced cost goods and services for many years. Until the early 1990's determining which players were “high rollers” who were worth giving “comps” to, was essentially ad hoc and entirely up the judgment of the casino manager, without any significant element of technological support. As a result, comping was typically limited to players of table games (e.g., blackjack, crap, baccarat), where the player's betting could be observed by a table or pit boss, who “rated” the player, based on the boss's estimate of the amount of time the player gambled and their average bet. Slot tracking programs then developed in the late 1980's offered the capability to track player betting in slot machines, enabling the casino to more precisely determine how much a particular player had gambled in a particular period of time on one or more slot machines. The first of these slot clubs were limited to operating at individual casinos. As a result, the casinos became more able to comp slot players who were valuable to the casino, and not merely high roller table players. In 1996 Harrah's Entertainment introduced the first player tracking club that operated at multiple properties and nationwide. This allowed its casinos to capture the betting behavior of any player at any of its multiple casinos, and thereby base decisions on whether and how much to comp such a player according to their overall level of betting across the multiple casinos. Multiple property player tracking clubs for tracking slot play are just now becoming more common with the introduction of several such multiple property clubs in the past several years.
Given the computer and networking infrastructure used to support a player tracking program, the casino must decide how to reward players who participate in the player tracking program. Each casino typically uses a different combination of comps and incentives that it believes most appropriately rewards such players for their gaming activity. One such program gives players rewards players by granting credits (called “points”) that can be redeemed for cash or cash equivalents. Significantly, the credits are earned at a fixed rate, and this rate is published to the players. Thus, players earn four “points” for each dollar that they bet. Points are accumulated over time, and then can be redeemed by the player for free meals, room, and entertainment. Because the rate (or schedule) at which points are earned is published to the players, players can readily determine how many points they will earn from their betting during particular gaming session or from any other activity for which points are rewarded. The problem with this approach is that it prevents the casino property from individually differentially comping players based on their value to the casino. In other words, with a fixed rate schedule, every player earns points in the same way, at the same rate, for the same activities. Both the “high roller” who bets thousands of dollars an hour, and the nickel slot player earn points and comps at the same rate, even though the high roller is worth more to casino. This fixed and published schedule for earning points thus fails to adequately differentiate players based on their value to the casino.
Other casinos attempt to overcome this problem by using a comp system that is not published. Instead, the casino maintains in secret the formulas or rates used to award comp to the players based on their gaming and other activities. This does allow the casino to treat players more individually by rewarding different players at different rates or with different comps. However, it also makes it impossible for individual players to know with certainty that they are earning comps, since it appears that the casino acts entirely at its own discretion. Even where players know that the more they bet the more they are comped, this level of knowledge is not sufficient for players to specifically understand the relationship between their gaming behavior and the amount of points or credits that the are earning.
Finally, even when a casino has provided both points and comps, the mechanisms by which points and comps were earned were kept entirely separate. Thus, players would earn points in an account based on certain aspects of their betting behavior, and may have separately earned comps, but there was no relationship between the two forms of incentives in terms of how they were earned, accounted for, or redeemed.